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Date Posted: 22:57:32 10/27/11 Thu
Author: George
Subject: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
In reply to: Lois 's message, "Re: Price silencing... good, bad, indifferent?" on 10:08:40 10/27/11 Thu

>>truth may be everlasting George, but nonsense and
>>nastiness seem to reign supreme on this board!
>>
>>john
>>
>john,
>
>So? Why do you come here then?
>
>Lois


My guess, Lois, is that John is slipping out of the grasp of the radical leftist political nuts running the Communitarian Church.

Just as Jerald and Sandra Tanner ended up becoming exMormons and critics of the church as the end product of trying to prepare a campaign to vindicate the Book of Mormon and justify the historical acts of the church, John is in the middle of playing advocate and apologist for the Communitarian Church. It will certainly backfire on him.

When I first heard about the lockouts, and the silencing, and the excommunications of hundreds of RLDS that had occurred just two to three years before I joined the church, I was like John -- I didn't believe it happened. Nonsense.

Then one day the news slipped through about the same-sex shacking up ceremonies that had been going on for eight years already, and the homosexual ordinations that had been going on for who knows how long, and doubt set in. After all, if your leaders lie and/or keep secrets about important things like that, no one can be sure that they don't and won't lie about nearly everything that they think cannot be independently verified.

John has almost completed his slide from from Stage One (Denial) into Stage Two (Rationalization.) As late as six weeks before I resigned my membership, I was vocally defending W. Grant McMurray's betrayal of the RLDS fundamentals because I wanted to believe that it was a sensible and logical approach. The Rationalization stage lasts differing lengths of time in different people.

Stage Three is Anger ... Anger that the people you trusted to help you know God and grow in grace are not only pathological liars and frauds who think that you are completely stupid, but wouldn't recognize God if he showed up as Jesus Christ in person.

When I enter Stage Four, I'll let you know what that is. My former spiritual advisors at the CofC certainly don't know, and most orthodox Christian churches (with the notable exception of the Roman Catholic Church) haven't experienced this sort of denomination-wide betrayal recently (if ever) and don't have anybody able to counsel on this, either.

John may get to Stage Four before I do. If he does, then he can tell us

The self-contradictory paradoxes of the Community of Christ's "revisioning" of the church make the faith of believers in the revisioning very brittle. Just as with a metal casting that has internal stress in it from mishap in the casting process, any really hard blow (figurative, people, figurative) in the right place will break it. My only question is whether or not John's fracture line will leave his faith restorable, or if it will have a fracture line in such a direction, depth, and extent that it is nonrestorable.

I'm still in the process of putting the pieces back together. That's why I haven't got to Stage Four yet.

When John moves from Stage Two to Stage Three, the CofC will give him up as a lost cause. That's what the CofC did with me, as soon as it realized I was in Stage Three. Being the prime mover behind all that is objectionable in the church, the leadership knows that after a dissident reaches Stage Three, nothing less than repentance and mending their ways will be enough to make any difference. And, to paraphrase Matt's consistent message, the CofC's repentance and return to to the faith "once delivered to the saints" "ain't gonna happen."

George

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